Buy Oil while BLOOD is in the Streets

Buy Oil while BLOOD is in the Streets

Oil prices have caused financial disruptions. Do NOT let that SCARE YOU.

There will be bankruptcies and credit events among the overleveraged.

Buy Oil while blood is in the streets. This will be a boom for the better-capitalized oil companies. These companies can then buy distressed competitors and the reserve assets rather than having to shell out on exploring greenfield sites for new sources of oil.

The sharp fall in oil prices has certainly been disruptive. But stabilization from distressed trough levels should be good for economic growth even if the price of oil doesn’t rebound back to peak levels of above $100 a barrel in 2014.

Buy Oil while blood is in the streets

We know there are a number of factors contributing to the oversupply of oil currently.
a) Successful US shale production over the last few years combined with
b) the decision of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Saudi Arabia in particular not to cut
c) production has added to an already oversupplied market. And,
d) there’s more potential supply pending Iran’s return to the market following the lifting of sanctions.
For oil prices to normalize, this excess production needs to be removed from the market somehow.

Still, we think the oversupply situation needs to be put into context. Various estimates today show a global oversupply of somewhere between 1 million to 1.5 million barrels a day of oil. Considering roughly 94 million barrels a day are consumed around the world, that oversupply is roughly 1%–2%,1 or just one year of demand growth at current rates. This is far lower than where the market was in the 1980s when OPEC and Saudi Arabia adopted a similar market share strategy.

With managed decline rates of roughly 4%–5% in the existing oil wells and declining industry investment, we think it’s inevitable that oil supply and demand will come back into balance at some point in the future. But in the short term, we believe the price of oil may need to fall to a level that forces excess supply off the market. This is happening today, although it’s taking longer than many have expected. Many investors wonder how low prices can go. In our view, the lower the price of oil goes in the short term, the quicker the rebalancing process should happen because it becomes uneconomical for some producers to even keep current oil production online. There are forecasts of oil prices falling to $20 a barrel. But at that level a decent amount of crude oil is losing money on a cash basis. So we would likely see a stronger supply response than we have seen so far.

In terms of overall industry investment, according to our analysis, global exploration and production capital expenditure (CAPEX) likely fell in 2015 and is expected to decline again in 2016. That would mark the first time in at least three decades that the oil industry has registered two consecutive years of investment decline.

Geopolitical risks are also clearly mounting as the Middle East is certainly in a fragile state right now. If we think about what’s going on in the region today, the list is certainly long—from the conflicts we see in Syria, Yemen and Libya. The rise in terrorism and more recently the increasing tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia are causing conflicts. The oil price collapse puts significant pressure on Middle Eastern geopolitics. Lower oil revenues in exporting nations have prompted governments to take actions to protect their fiscal positions.

Iraq, Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia together produce roughly 20% of the world’s crude oil. Yet, there seems to be little if any geopolitical premium built into oil prices at the moment. Should tensions escalate further and lead to any other oil outage, the current buffer of global oversupply could be reversed pretty quickly. This is not our base-case expectation; however, it certainly remains an upside risk for oil, which we think currently is not being priced in.

As previously noted, major sovereign producers do not have the financial resources to tolerate low oil prices indefinitely. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil and Venezuela (key oil exporters) are all experiencing significant budgetary shortfalls attributed to lower oil prices. Although some countries have more financial reserves than others, stresses are already being felt in the market.

So over time, we see the market re-adjusting from a world of oversupply to balanced and then potentially undersupplied farther out. At this point the oil price will need to rise to a level that will promote additional production to come back online. This needs to be done in order to replace the natural decline rate and satisfy future demand growth. When might this happen? Our expectation as we move through 2016 and into 2017 is that the supply and demand imbalance will slowly erode through a combination of reduced production and increased demand growth.

Finding Values in the Energy Sector

Given the stress we have seen on oil prices in the market, we have also seen a similar stress on oil-industry companies. We have been finding decent value within the energy space, and in some cases, we have been presented with valuation levels that we have not witnessed in decades. We have found major integrated oil companies with solid balance sheets and sizable dividends that we believe should be able to navigate the market uncertainty and also potentially benefit from the cost deflation and capital discipline over time. On the other end of the spectrum are the US exploration and production companies and the service companies that are highly correlated to oil prices should benefit greatly once supply and demand normalizes—and the US shale industry is one we think could recover first. That said, we are very selective right now because of course we want to be positioned in what we believe will be the survivors.

We’ve certainly witnessed a good dose of New Year gloom fueled by the many proximate risks that seem imminent to some market participants. However, sentiment swings drive the short-term voting machine of the market. The ongoing challenge is to stay unemotional, balanced and objective, remaining focused on the longer-term fundamentals and waiting for the time positive surprises come and sentiment shifts. Buy Oil while blood is in the streets